In the past few decades there have been breathtaking
advances in science. Perhaps one of the
most astonishing is the mapping of the human genome, which contains all of a
person’s genetic information. This work has shown that every single difference
in our physical bodies--our sex, skin color, eyes, teeth, height, bone density,
etc. comprise less than
one-half-of-one-percent of the human genome. That means all humans on
earth, all women, all men and all races, are biologically 99.5 % the same.

One justly asks, then, what it is about women that so
frightens the male Catholic hierarchy; why the Church, for millennia, has gone
to such great lengths to diminish and denigrate women. The answer is part
culture and part quest for control. Wise
individuals both within the Church and without (in more ways than one,) are
trying to change this situation; but inequality between women and men is still
pervasive.

In refusing to recognize women priests today the best
argument the Vatican can come up with is it’s 1976 Declaration on the Question of Admitting Women to the Priesthood,
which justifies exclusion of women on the grounds that the female body does not
resemble the male body of Christ. This is sadly risible.

Taken literally, it creates an Alice in Wonderland spiral
that descends into nonsense. It says
that in Catholicism, one’s physical body is more important to God than one’s
spiritual soul.

If that is correct, then the 1976 Declaration on the Question of Admitting Women to the Priesthood
must be read in one of two ways. First, to channel Christ’s energy, the male
body of every priest must resemble the presumably healthy (according to
artwork,) body of Jesus. Thus disabled
or impotent men are excluded from the priesthood because their bodies do not
resemble the male body of Christ. Further, a blonde man with blue eyes, a
Hispanic, Asian, or Black man is excluded from the priesthood because his body
does not resemble the male body of Christ, as depicted in artwork. But what if
Jesus was Black, being of Middle Eastern descent? If so, then all White men
must be excluded from the priesthood because their bodies don’t resemble the
male body of Christ.

Since it is impossible to determine exactly if Jesus was
a Black man or a White man, a sexually potent or impotent man, then just to be
safe--because the Vatican doesn’t want to include anyone whose body does not
resemble the male body of Christ--all men must be excluded from the priesthood.

But maybe the Church is talking here about genital
organs. It has been said that at times men think with them, but that usually
refers to concupiscence, not reason or faith. The teachings of Jesus are based
on spiritual qualities of compassion, equality, forgiveness, peace and justice.
Given these, one’s sex has nothing to do with the priesthood. (We’re not
talking about clerical sexual abuse here. Or are we?)

According to Catholic dogma,“...a priest, by ordination,
receives the power to celebrate the Eucharist, to forgive sins, to bless, to
preach, to sanctify.” One does not need a male sex organ to perform any of
these functions. If truth be told, a male sex organ often gets in the way of
the proper performance of priestly tasks. Furthermore, women priests
(presbyters), deaconesses, bishops, prophets and abbesses in earlier centuries
and today have performed all of these duties.

In the 1970‘s during communist rule in Czechoslovakia,
Ludmila Javorová was one of several Czech women priests ordained by a bishop
because the Communists would not suspect a woman of saying mass. As Javorová says, “A principal reason for our
ordination was that in women’s prisons, nuns and other inmates died without
priestly support or the sacraments.”

All humans are 99.5% the same biologically. But much more importantly, there is no
difference in the spiritual relationship of women and men to our loving God.
The word, “catholic”, from which the Church took its name, means
“all-embracing.” To live up to it’s
name, the Catholic Church must work for common humanity. A huge step in this direction would be to
welcome women priests on all levels of Church Clergy.

Friday, March 30, 2012

The meanings of
words change over time. For example, the meaning of awful went from ‘amazing’, to ‘terrible’; decimate, from ‘reduce by one-tenth,’ to ‘destroy’; and, cell from ‘a small unit’ to ‘mobile
phone’.

So too has the
word, “ordination” changed over centuries. Jesus never ordained anyone. In the
early Church, “ordination” meant ‘to confer a role in a community.’ Records
exist of ‘ordinations’ of doorkeepers, people committed to the care of books,
sacristans, abbesses, etc. While women and men served at the altar as priests
and deacons, they were not necessarily ‘ordained’ to do so.

Not until the
12th century did ‘ordination’ acquire it’s present meaning of ‘bestowing
authority.’ Thus, to talk about early Church ‘ordination’ as we think of it
today, is to impose a definition developed in the 12th century onto an earlier
period. [Gary Macy, The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination.]

So what,
really, was going on in the Church all those hundreds of years?

The 9th to 14th
centuries were a time of great upheaval, and women became a scapegoat for
Church troubles. Papal wars with the Italian States created threats to papal
authority as the Church became bolder in its claims for power. Other events
that expanded the Church’s cruel and misogynistic practices include:

---The Church had become immensely corrupt. Parish priests were
illiterate and immoral; high ranking clergy were appointed by and served,
powerful lords

---Married priests gave away Church land as inheritances. To end
this practice, clerical celibacy was demanded; to ensure celibacy, women were
villified

---In its attempt at reform, the Church worked to remove women
from service at the altar

---Crusades put the Church in contact with Aristotle’s faulty
reasoning about women

---The Church became centralized and asserted Papal supremacy

---Witches (benevolent healers,) once denied as ‘real’ by the
Church, were used to defame women. The Church depicted witches as the Devil’s
consorts

---Pope John XXII authorized the Inquisition to prosecute
witchcraft

---Church infighting created two popes who ruled simultaneously:
Urban in Rome; Clement at Avignon

---Pope Innocent VIII authorized inquisitors to persecute
witches. Their manual was published and reprinted for 200 years.

Tracts against
women reflected the tortured souls of men who mendaciously claimed women had
sex with Satan and lustfully tried to corrupt men. Through a deliberate,
methodical effort, Church hierarchy erased the memory of women priests.

“Women as well as men functioned as prophets
and priests. Among ancient mosaics paintings,
statuary, dedicatory inscriptions and funerary epitaphs, scholars have found
evidence for women’s leadership. In the
writings of the New Testament, letters, sermons and the theological treatises
of the early Church, women’s leadership is well attested. Where women leaders played prominent roles,
male authors muted their contributions by the way they wrote their stories.
[Karen Jo Torjesen. When Women Were Priests.]

For example,
the Virgin Mary prophesied in “The Magnificat” (Luke 1:47-55) “He has put down
the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of low degree; he has filled
the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent empty away.” This resounds
across centuries as a prophecy, yet Luke does not call the Virgin Mary a
prophet.

Inscriptional,
canonical, literary and epigraphical evidence validate the fact that there were
clearly female deacons and priests in the early Church. Well into the 12th
century, women were considered as fully ordained as male clergy. [Gary Macy, The
Hidden History of Women Priests.] Even condemnations of women priests by
the Church (as in the Synod of Nimes,
or Letter of Gelasius,) are
ironically, testament to women priests. [Kevin Madigan and Carolyn Osiek, Ordained
Women in the Early Church.] They show women priests did exist and they were
hated by the institutional Church. Thus the claim that women have never
functioned as priests in the Church is simply not true.

Thursday, March 29, 2012

To solve a problem, one first must approach it with an
unbiased mind. This can be difficult when one has been indoctrinated since
childhood about an issue.

Then one needs to figure out where the problem came from.
By tracing the Church back to the Ancient World, one learns that, because of
the culture that surrounded it, the Church first accepted and then rejected
women priests.

PLATO (427-347 BC)

Greek philosopher Plato, student of Socrates, laid the
foundations of Western philosophy. He wrote that in the Greek society, a
women’s function was to produce children, especially sons. "Confined in
the parental home until a husband was chosen--at which time she was in her
mid-teens and he at least fifteen years older--the woman was transferred to his
home to fulfill her principal function of bearing and rearing children. Sons
were raised in the family but only one daughter, at most, was reared. Other
girls were exposed; if they did not die, they might be picked up by slave
dealers and prepared for a life of slavery or prostitution."

ARISTOTLE (384-322 BC)

Plato’s student, Aristotle, who taught Alexander the
Great, also accepted the subordination of women without being able to justify
it. He posited that woman's inability to produce semen was her deficiency.
(Aristotle’s father was a physician.) Women were 'incomplete' men, because
semen contained the whole human being. Science has long proven this false. Both
female ova and male semen combine to form an embryo.

THOMAS AQUINAS
(1225-1274)

800 years later, Italian Dominican priest Thomas Aquinas
propagated Aristotle’s faulty thinking in his immensely influential 13th
century arguments. The society of his time was in great upheaval and the Church
sought to secure it’s absolute authority. The Church still sees Aquinas as a
model for seminarians. He is considered it’s greatest theologian, despite the
fact that his melding of Aristotelian thought with Christianity led to
misogynist views of women; views prevalent until the 1960s, when they began to
be challenged.

ORDAINED WOMEN IN THE
EARLY CHURCH

Most Christians today presume women played little role in
the early Church. But the Church did not
spring up suddenly into a well defined organization with buildings, officials
and large congregations. In it’s earliest stages it was a social movement. It
was informal, often counter cultural, and marked by a fluidity and flexibility
that allowed women to assume leadership roles. [Karen Jo Torjesen. When
Women Were Priests]

In the two centuries after Christ’s death, Christians, a
hodgepodge of peoples, were disdainfully dismissed as a “third race” by Greeks
and Romans. Women priests, (presbyters,) deacons, and abbesses and were
persecuted equally with men. Otherwise,
female priests were mostly ignored because they conformed to cultural
norms.

Christian communities met in “house churches” to avoid
persecution. Because women were heads of households, they were pivotal in
Christian worship and served as priests (presbyters) and deacons. As Christianity grew, it’s congregants moved
to the public sector and became more visible. When that happened, pressure increased
on Christians to follow Middle Eastern practices that decreed women belonged in
the home.

Thus Catholic Church hierarchy was born of politics and
culture, not faith; its rules marginalizing women follow those of Middle
Eastern and North African cultures in Syria, Egypt, Palestine, Algeria,
Armenia, Turkey, Greece, and Italy.

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Like
organizations everywhere, the Catholic Church began with a passion, energy and
devotion to a cause--to spread God’s Gospel of love. And like organizations
everywhere, it got long in the tooth. As it aged, it became more interested in
holding onto what it had than in promoting the goal upon which it was founded
in the first place. That is why the Catholic Church needs to be reformed. We
stay vital because of our capacity for renewal.
If the Catholic Church does not regenerate itself, it will calcify and
die. The Catholic Church must abandon misogynist attitudes it adopted centuries
ago to maintain power; it must follow the teaching of Jesus to love one another
and see the sacred in our everyday lives; it must accept women priests as it
has in the past. The Church’s mission must be reclaimed. And women priests will help.

In contrast to past cultures, women today are educated,
independent and make significant contributions to humankind in all fields.
Furthermore, we live in a world of instantaneous communication. We can get
information we used to go to college for, on the internet in two minutes. This,
along with research and education, reveal the true history of Catholic Women
Priests. The assumption that women were always excluded from the priesthood is
not historically accurate. This is based on at least three foundations:

1 -- Women and men are called equal by God and Jesus as revealed
in the Old and New Testaments

2 -- Archaeological evidence confirms women have been priests, (presbyters) bishops, prophets, and abbesses in the early Church

3 -- Catholic Church misogyny has nothing to do with the
question of “who” can serve God at the Church altar. It has everything to do with the fear and
cupidity of clerics who strove for absolute authority

JESUS CONFRONTED THE GREEK AND ROMAN CULTURE

The Bible,
written over 3,000 years ago (1450-465 BCE) in a time spanning 1,000 years by
over 40 different authors, unveils a Middle Eastern culture with radically
different views of women and men than today’s world. Women were considered
inferior; could not be educated; go alone in public; or talk with strangers.
Yet the Bible affirms the equality of women and men. Genesis 1:27: "...in
the image of God, God created him; male and female God created them."
Jesus confirmed this equality by defying centuries of laws and consistently
treating women and men as equal in God’s love. A few examples:

-- He treated women as equal to men when he cured a woman and
called her a “Daughter of Abraham,” implying equal status with “Son of
Abraham,” which respectfully referred to a Jew: Luke 13:16: 5

-- He embraced women in his inner circle: Luke 8:1-3: 12

-- He appeared first to women after his resurrection: Matt
28:9-10 (4)

The teachings
of Jesus were “radically egalitarian in their day and constituted a social
revolution that likely provoked his crucifixion.” [Karen Jo Torjesen. When
Women Were Priests.] Only later, as Christianity became more bureaucratic
and muscular, did the Church begin to marginalize the role of its women
priests.

http://marquettetribune.org/2012/03/27/news/pink-smoke-over-the-vatican-stirs-student-debate-over-ordained-women/by Andrea Anderson"The 58-minute film and attached academic event was sponsored by Marquette’s
Women’s and Gender Studies Program and shared the views of men
and women who encourage the ordination of women, along with those who oppose it.
Janice Sevre-Duszynska, one of 12 women ordained in 2006 on the waters outside
of Pittsburgh, was at the screening and shared her story with the audience and
partook in the question-and-answer session after.“Pink Smoke Over the Vatican” shares the stories of men and women who are
working to put an end to the “underlying misogyny and outdated feudal governance
that is slowly destroying the Roman Catholic Church,” the video’s website said.
The name comes from supporters’ actions on April 17, 2005 when they released
pink smoke in front of several U.S. cathedrals in an attempt to call churches to
open doors fully to women participation.At the beginning of the documentary the narrator continuously repeats the
question, “Where are the women’s voices?” and then cites the 1024 Canon Law that
says only a baptized male can be ordained.Dr. Dorothy Irvin, a Roman Catholic theologian, explained in the film that
the woman’s role in the church was eradicated after the Roman Empire made
Catholicism its official religion. Before this, women were ordained and
practiced the sacraments, all proven by the discovery of mosaics in South Africa
and pictures in catacombs across the world..."

Bridget Mary's Reflection:Way to go Marquette's Women's and Gender Studies Program Educators- Faculty and Students!What a great opportunity to share the vision of an inclusive priestly ministry in a community of equals with college students! Bridget Mary Meehan, ARCWPwww.arcwp.org

"The major problem of eucharistic
theology in our century is not that people do not understand and value the
meaning of Eucharist. The problem is that they do.

The Eucharist, every
child learns young, is the sign of Christian community, the very heart of it, in
fact. And who would deny the bond, the depth, the electrical force that welds us
together in it? Here, we know, is the linkage between us and the Christ, between
us and the Gospel, between us and the Tradition that links us to Jesus himself
and so to the world around us. No, what the Eucharist is meant to be is not
what’s in doubt.

What’s in doubt is that the Eucharist is really being
allowed to do what it purports to do—to connect us, to unify us, to make us One.
The truth is that as much as Eucharist is a sign of community it is also a sign
of division. For the sake of some kind of ecclesiastical political fiascos
centuries ago between the East and West, we close the table between Orthodox and
Uniate—though the faith is the same and the commitments are the same and the
vision of life and death are the same....."What’s in doubt, too, is that the
divisions posited between baptized men and baptized women can possibly witness
to what we say is the faith: that men and women are equal; that women are fully
human beings; that God’s grace is indivisible; that discipleship is incumbent on
us all; that we are all called to follow Christ.

At the end of one
presentation after another, women make it a point to continue the discussion
with me. ‘I used to be Catholic,’ they begin. ‘I was a Catholic once,’ they say.
‘I’m a recovering Catholic now,’ they announce. It’s a sad litany of
disillusionment and abandonment by a Church they once thought promised them
fullness of life and then let them know that it is their very persons that deny
them that. They are to get out of the pronouns and off the altars of the Church,
they read in its latest dictums. They may want to follow Jesus but Jesus,
they’re told, does not want to be followed by them.

Call it ‘holy’
communion if you want, they tell me, but it’s not. Not like that. Not under
those conditions.

So they go away to where Jesus waits for them, arms
open, in someone else’s Christian church. There’s something about it all that
simply defies the lesson of Mary Magdalene or the Woman at the Well or Mary of
Bethany or Mary of Nazareth. They go where every minister at the altar, every
bishop, every lawgiver, every homilist, every member of every Synod on the
planet is not male. They go where they can see ‘the image of God’ in themselves
in another woman. They go where eucharistic theology, which we’re told makes us
one, is palpable.?"– from “Eucharist” by Joan Chittister, Spirituality
Magazine. Volume 18, March-April 2012, No 101. Dominican Publications:
Republic of Ireland. Bridget Mary's ReflectionWomen today are finding a spiritual home in women-priest led communities. Two weeks ago, a woman participated in our inclusive Mary Mother of Jesus Catholic Community liturgy in Sarasota, Florida. Sandy is typical of so many that I have met. She cried tears of joy throughout the liturgy. Afterwards, she told us that all her life she felt that God was calling her to be a priest and she now knew that this was a possibility for her! During our Christmas liturgy this past year, a woman shared how much she felt at home and that she wished that all Catholics could experience our Christmas liturgy. Women priests communities use inclusive language,welcome all to the Eucharist, and are inclusive so both women and men can and do preside at the table. In our community, we have two married priests partners and two women priests. So, if you are interested in women priest led liturgies, check out our web sites in the Untied States:www.arcwp.orgwww.romancatholicwomenpriests.orgBridget Mary Meehan, ARCWPsofiabmm@aol.com

"It has been 20 years since Matthew Fox was expelled from the Dominican order
after a 12-year battle with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith. In the decades since, Fox has continued writing,
teaching and ministering to various communities. In 1994, he was welcomed into
the Anglican Communion as an Episcopal priest. Fox has authored 28 books, the
most recent being The Pope's War: Why Ratzinger's Secret Crusade Has Imperiled
the Church and How It Can Be Saved. "

"In The Pope's War, you have a chapter called "Treasures from
the Burning Building: What is Worth Saving?" What from the Catholic tradition do
you most want to rescue?Certainly the mystical and prophetic figures: Hildegard, Aquinas, Eckhart,
Julian of Norwich, Francis of Assisi. All these great mystics were really
reformers, too. Also, the great 20th century souls, from the whole base
community movement South America, Bishop Casigalida, Bishop Camera, Leonardo
Boff, Dorothy Day, Bede Griffiths, Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Merton, Thomas
Berry. There is a lot of richness that needs to be taken along, but we have
travel so much lighter in the 21st century. We can't carry basilicas on our
backs."

So the church should be not only post-denominational, but
post-institutional, too?We have to move away from looking at religion as primarily a sociologically
institutional vestment and start seeing it as yeast within society that raises
up justice, compassion, healing, celebration, forgiveness and, of course,
creativity. Leonardo Boff talks about "ecclesiogenesis," or "birthing church."
What kinds of communities are we birthing? And what kinds of nonsense are we
standing up to? There are forms of fundamentalism arising throughout
Christianity and they are hijacking the real spirit that Jesus unleashed. We
have to save Jesus from the church.

Do you think people must begin seeking church outside the walls of
the institution?Definitely. It's so clear that the institutional version of the church is
melting before our eyes. I began The Pope's War with a quote from Fr.
Bede Griffiths, who said to me at the very end of his life, "Don't even think
about the Vatican. Don't look over your shoulder. It'll all come tumbling down
one day like the Berlin Wall. Keep using your energy to grow new shoots." ..."We have to stand up to ideology, which is like
idolatry. It freezes up hearts, minds and souls. We have to listen to the Holy
Spirit. She elects to make things new. The Holy Spirit has always been biased in
favor of creativity...

[Jamie L. Manson received her Master of Divinity degree from Yale Divinity
School, where she studied Catholic theology and sexual ethics. Her columns for
NCR earned her a first prize Catholic Press Association award for Best
Column/Regular Commentary in 2010.]

..."After complaints of sexual abuse were filed against Father Maciel in 1998, Benedict, who was then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, quashed a Vatican investigation. He reopened the case in 2004, ultimately finding that Father Maciel had led a double life and had raped seminarians, fathered several children and abused drugs while leading a charismatic organization known for producing priests. Critics say that he was part of an institutional culture that protected the Legionaries of Christ because of Father Maciel’s close ties to high-ranking officials in John Paul II’s papacy... Father Athié said. “What we are asking of Pope Ratzinger is, recognize your responsibility. It is the root of Christian experience. You can come back from wherever you are, as long as you recognize and want to come back...It is the incompatibility between "Pope Ratzinger" on the one hand, and "recognize your responsibility", also known as "human conscience", which is "the root of Christian experience", on the other. It is for all, not for the many, that Father Athié asks this Pope, "Do you want to come back?". To us, to our Church, not yours!The answer? The guilty silence of one Pope."